Download e-book for iPad: Behind the Scenes of the Universe - From the Higgs to Dark by Gianfranco Bertone

A unprecedented discovery has lately shaken the rules of Cosmology and Particle Physics, sparking a systematic revolution that has profoundly transformed our knowing of our Universe and that's nonetheless faraway from over. Pioneering astronomers within the Nineteen Twenties and Nineteen Thirties had already spotted suspicious anomalies within the movement of celestial our bodies in far away galaxies and clusters of galaxies, however it wasn't till the past due twentieth century that the clinical group used to be faced with an spectacular end: the Universe is stuffed with an unknown, elusive substance that's essentially various from something we've ever noticeable with our telescopes or measured in our laboratories. it truly is referred to as darkish subject, and it constitutes some of the most urgent demanding situations of contemporary technology. during this ebook, geared toward the final reader with an curiosity in technology, the writer illustrates in non-technical phrases, borrowing innovations and concepts from different branches of artwork and literature, the far-reaching implications of this discovery. It has resulted in a world race to spot the character of this mysterious kind of topic. We can be approximately to witness a pivotal paradigm shift in Physics, as we got down to attempt the life of darkish subject debris with a big selection of experiments, together with the massive Hadron Collider at CERN, in addition to with a brand new iteration of Astroparticle experiments underground and in house.

The r-process is an incredible mechanism for generating components heavier than Fe. during this e-book, a precis of contemporary advancements in theoretical, experimental and observational experiences of the r-process are provided in 25 contributions. The accumulated papers are brand new, entire and but concise. the themes coated comprise experiments on nuclei faraway from balance, nuclear concept enter for the r-process, observational and theoretical reports on abundances of heavy nuclei, and astrophysical versions of the r-process.

Opposite to well known trust fostered in numerous college school rooms across the world, Christopher Columbus didn't detect that the earth used to be around. the belief of a round global have been largely permitted in expert circles from as early because the fourth century b. c. but, bizarrely, it was once no longer till the supposedly extra rational 19th century that the inspiration of a ?

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Monsters 51 Hercules carved the words Nec Plus Ultra, “nothing beyond this point”, on the pillars he had placed on the European and African sides of the Strait of Gibraltar, which represented the limits of the known world. Dante, in his Inferno, celebrates the curiosity and will of Ulysses, who incites his companions to go past the Pillars of Hercules to advance knowledge and to explore what lies in the “terra incognita”. But Ulysses dies shortly after his legendary step into the unknown. Are our attempts to go beyond known physics doomed to fail, or are new discoveries awaiting us in the terra incognita of particle physics?

We are special, in a way we could never have suspected. Lurking in the dark 29 Pocket universes How do we validate our model of the evolution of the universe from the Big Bang to the appearance of life on the Earth? As with any other scientiﬁc model or theory, we can never prove it right (the best we can do is to prove it wrong, or “falsify” it), but we can at least test how well it can explain observational data. This is, however, a daunting task, especially when one considers that even the three-body problem—the problem of describing the orbits of three celestial bodies under their reciprocal gravitational attraction—is extraordinarily difﬁcult, and can only be solved in some simpliﬁed cases.

The star inﬂates, and becomes a giant. Then it inﬂates more, until the outer layers are blown away into interstellar space. The carbon atom travels undisturbed through the Galaxy, until it gets captured in a protoplanetary nebula, where a pale Sun is shining its ﬁrst light. There, it is swallowed into the interior of the still-forming Earth. After millions of years, it is spitted out high into the atmosphere through an immense volcano, bound to two oxygen atoms, until it is caught in a raindrop that brings it down again, this time into the ocean.